Comment by nine_k
1 year ago
Inkjet printer makers sell printers way below cost of production, making the money on the ink.
There will always be enough people who would buy a $129 printer and postpone the reckoning in ink, instead of buying a $329 printer that can print reams using cheap bulk ink.
(Laser printers are superior anyway, unless you print photos.)
What keeps the production cost high?
A new inkjet-- especially if you're not getting a photo-optimized one-- isn't doing that much technically different from a 20-year-old one. You don't need 4800DPI and rich six-ink photo finishes if all you're asking for is one four-colour pie chart in a 20-page report, so you don't need to be at the edge of premium technology here.
So why can't they just keep manufacturing a 20-year-old DeskJet, using long-amortized tooling and fully-worked-out mechanicals, but with a new controller board to replace parallel with USB/Ethernet/Wi-fi?
In the mid 2000s, there was a model of inkjet printer that came with full size ink cartridges. It was usually priced "on sale" for less than the price of a new set of ink cartridges. Meaning if you did a normal amount of printing, it was more economically viable to buy a new printer every every few months and throw the old one away than it was to buy replacement cartridges.
It revealed a lot about the incentive structure of the inkjet printer market.
Are you thinking of a specific model? What model?
All models I personally experienced came with ink cartridges containing less ink than replacement cartridges. I participated in a ton of ink cartridge refilling during 1998-2007.
For most consumers back then, I could easily imagine that it was still more cost effective to buy new printers (with partial cartridges) than it was to buy replacements.